Some great videos on India on this 60th Independence Day! It sure does feel proud to be Indian 
Part1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
There is also a good debate at:
http://www.moneycontrol.com/india/video/stockmarket/03/53/newsvideo/297602
British summer is finally here and I’ve been on the lookout for activities to do and place’s to visit. Some of my team mates were going water skiing! At first I was a bit hesitant as I had never been water skiing before, but then as I like a bit of adventure, I decided to give this Lake City invented sport a shot. I liked the fact that we were put straight in the water and there were no long lectures or instructions before getting wet. Only thing we were told was to keep our arms straight, knees bent and back straight, not the most comfortable position to be in! If it wasn’t water skiing, I’m sure this position would be quite punishing to the person sitting in it! I started out holding a bar on the side of the boat and fell one time, but then I got it right and it felt great! After about 10 minutes on the bar, I was ready to take on the rope! The rope turned out a little harder to take control of to get up, but once I was up there it was an exhilarating experience. The mix of speed, wind and water is simply amazing! I’m sure this isn’t the last of my water skiing ventures so stay tuned….
I was wandering around youtube and came across this video! It’s pretty funny check it out… If people in RL start behaving like avatars in SL, we’d be in for quite a surprise
Something very interesting came along as I walked into work this morning! Friends of mine started reporting that when they logged into Facebook, they can read other people’s messages. I tried it myself (Facebook isn’t banned in our office, not yet anyway J). Firstly, when I visited the facebook site, there was someone’s email address there already in the login box. This was not mine or anyone who had used my machine. Clearing it out and logging in, when I clicked on inbox, I could see a full page of someone else’s messages. When I clicked any of them to read further, it took me back to my profiles page. So, I could not read the actual message, but the inbox gives the subject name of person the message is from and the first few lines, which is a drastic breach of people’s privacy. Clicking on notifications, the page was yet again full of notifications, of people I don’t know! Happy Facebook’in 
Update: Facebook is now upgrading….
Update 2: Facebook is finally back! I guess they upgraded their servers and fixed the technical glitches! I can now see my messages and my notifications J I wonder if they’re going to make a public announcement of what went wrong!
Once again it’s been a long time since I posted anything on my blog. What’s been cooking you might ask? Well… One of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on. We’re showcasing Imagine Cup on Second Life. Second Life is an internet-based virtual word. Since opening in 2003, Second Life has grown to a total of more than 7,000,000 users who interact, socialize and trade through their 3-D character, which is customizable to look like the real you or be innovative and even morph into another being. The Imagine Cup Gallery has been created to showcase winning student teams and their applications from the national Imagine Cup Software Design finals and to provide an interactive and social forum for Imagine Cup contestants to chat and hang out with other software design teams and like-minded individuals who share a common passion: technology. Students from Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), representing 21 countries, will showcase their projects at the event and will have their own avatars present to demonstrate their innovative projects using streaming video and image-animated presentations.
We’ve been developing and designing the Imagine Cup Island in Second Life and it’s been really exciting. The island is divided into 12 zones that will have 12 video screens playing the videos prepared by winning teams of the software design invitational. In the centre of the island we have a welcome zone that has information on how to navigate, the Imagine Cup theme music in the background. We even have a stage, bar and a skydive launch pad with customized Imagine Cup parachutes for you to really have a gala time during the launch party. To top this off, Natalie Moody, one of the most celebrated artists in Second Life will be performing live for visitors to the island.
There is not much more I can talk about the island to describe it in words, now you have to fly in yourself to this virtual world to experience an adventure like never before! So get your Second Life and then teleport to the Imagine Cup Island by clicking on http://slurl.com/secondlife/10/128/64/24/ at 8:30 PM CET on June 28th. See you there!
This is absolutely cool! I saw a brief demo of surface computing as a Microsoft Research Project, but now this is for real. Check it out on www.microsoft.com/surface or check out the demo video at http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/. A new way to interact with digital content, surface allows you to drag around images, grab data with our hands and move information around with simple touches and gestures. It also interacts with objects, recognizing them and reading data from them, for instance your account details off a loyalty card, or recognizing a phone as soon as it’s placed on a table top! It can have a whole wealth of applications, check out the video, as I don’t need to say much more!
I connected two blocks from different sources in popfly and voila an excellent comic viewer in a 3d carousel format! View it here
You don’t need to learn a whole lot of HTML, JAVA script or AJAX to build those really cool looking web pages and web 2.0 sites. Just choose the elements you want to show, link em mash em and that’s it you’re done! Popfly is really cool. It’s a web based service that uses the latest Silverlight (codnamed WPF/E) technology which integrates well with Visual studio (for the more adventurous!). So what does that mean? Well Popfly is the fun and easy way to build and share mash-ups, gadgets and Web pages using pre-built “Blocks” that connect to online services. You can easily build your first mash-up in minutes using the built-in tutorials and community features to get help fast. Popfly provides an online community for all non-professional developers to share their creations ranging from mashups to custom AJAX-applications to Windows projects. Still in alpha, I’m sure we’re going to see a lot of popfly magic all around.
I loved Pandora which is an online radio service that allows you to choose your favorite artists and simply create a radio station that plays your fav artists. Recently the site has been struggling with licensing issues and users in Europe are unable to listen to radio from the web. So I started my search for alternatives and guess what I found…
1. Musicovery - Nice interface you listen to music according to your mood. Simply click on what kind of music you’d like to hear energetic, positive, calm or dark and choose the genre and you’re good to go!
2. Last.fm – This is a simple Internet Radio page, where you simply enter which artist you want to listen to and hit enter, once again you listen to the music you like!
I guess there will be many more similar music sites opening up soon and at present they don’t have many ads as part of the service so it’s excellent!
During my recent visit to Brussels, I discovered the Delirium Cafe. With a Beer menu the size of a physics textbook, this cafe sure did impress me with its selection of Beers ranging in all sorts of variety from flavour, colour, strength and the fact that there’s a special type of glass for every beer! Well it was a beer-ful day!
